William Edward Campbell, to be remembered by the literary world as William March, was born in Mobile in September 1893 and experienced a fairly typical southern childhood of the period in the small towns of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. We know that after some study of law in the early years of this century at the University of Alabama and later at Valparaiso University in Indiana, and after a clerkship in law in New York City, March enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and saw action in some of its hardest campaigning in World War I in France. We likewise know for a fact that as a result of his actions specifically during an assault on Blanc Mont, March received the French Croix de Guerre and both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Navy Cross for valor. We know that after the war he bacame an organizer and later vice president of the Waterman Steamship Corporation, and then moved for an extended period to New York City, where, eventually resigning the successful business position that also carried him abroad in the 1930s to such palces as Hamburg and London, he became the author of Company K, of a large body of short stories including some of the most remarkable of his exceedingly talented American generation. March died in his sleep one night in mid-May in 1954.

“March’s prose is quiet, pithy, and deceptively powerful. A master of those two most potent literary devices, satire and irony, he employed them at times with savage exactitude, and at other times so subtly that it is not until the reader has laid aside the book that the full import of what March has been saying sinks home.”

—Roy Simmonds, Alabama Heritage

“March is best known for his powerful World War I book Company K and The Bad Seed, about an eight-year-old murderess, but March gave much more to American literature. He perceptively investigated the wide commonness of the human condition in a guileless, direct, patently engaging style. If there is pathological material in his fiction, there is also pity and pathos; if there is irony and satire, there is also wit and wisdom; if there is horror, there is also humanity and humor; if violence and crime, also compassion; if psychological abnormalities, a wide universal normality.”

—Bert Hitchcock, Salute to William March

“William March is one of the world’s classic modern writers, a whole ionosphere above Faulkner, and the unrecognized genius of our time.”—Alistair Cooke, A William March Omnibus